October 17, 2017

Edtech startup, Levered Learning, seeks local schools for new round of pilots

Press: The following article by Joshua Bradley was originally published in Santa Cruz Tech Beat, October 17, 2017

By Josh Bradley
Startup Coach, Step One
Special to Santa Cruz Tech Beat

October 17, 2017 — Soquel, CA

Levered Learning is accepting local schools for a new round of fourth grade pilots that will begin in January 2018.

Levered Learning, an ed-tech startup based in Soquel, recently released early pilot results from their math-focused instructional software. Last year’s pilot included 300 students in Santa Cruz County, Santa Clara County, and San Diego County. I first discovered Levered Learning and its founder Mitch Slater when I had the opportunity to coach the finalists in 2016’s Cruz Cares business pitch competition, where Levered Learning placed third. At that time, Levered was piloting in one school with a relatively small group of students, so the 2016 pilot announcement signifies a significant step forward in the platform’s development.

I reached out to Mitch to talk about the pilot and the results, and found it easy to catch the enthusiasm about the progress made from piloting. Levered Learning was popular with both the students and the teachers, with some teachers reporting students cheered as it they announced that it was time to start using “Levered”. In video interviews Mitch shared with me, the teachers were also not shy to heap praise for the platform, citing the ability for students to work at their own pace and feeling relief at the amount of time they saved on lesson preparation and assessment. In fact, all of the teachers involved in the pilots stated that they would recommend the software platform to their colleagues.